The Feuding Mountains, Hatfield-McCoy and Beyond

The Appalachian feud has been so thoroughly romanticized, caricatured, and exploited by outsiders that it can be hard to see the real thing underneath. The real thing is worth looking at clearly. The Hatfield-McCoy feud, which played out along the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River on the Kentucky-West Virginia border from the eighteen seventies through the eighteen nineties, was not primarily about moonshine or hillbilly irrationality.

It began as a property dispute, a contested ownership of a razorback hog in the eighteen seventies, and accelerated through a combination of Civil War residual bitterness, a disputed Kentucky election in eighteen eighty, a cross-border romance, and the killing of a McCoy by a Hatfield associate in eighteen eighty-two. By the time it reached its peak violence in January eighteen eighty-eight, when the Hatfields attacked the McCoy cabin on New Year's night and killed two McCoy children and severely beat the mother, the feud had claimed more than a dozen lives and attracted national newspaper coverage. What the newspapers largely missed was the structural context.

The feud counties were precisely those being targeted by outside timber and coal capital in the eighteen eighties. Families who had held land by informal custom for generations found their titles challenged. The legal system, where it functioned at all, functioned in favor of outside investors.

Violence between neighbors was not separable from the violence of dispossession. The feuds were a symptom of a region being absorbed into industrial capitalism faster than any legal or social institution could manage. The Rowan County War of eighteen eighty-four to eighteen eighty-seven, centered on Morehead in eastern Kentucky, killed about twenty people and brought the state government to the edge of declaring martial law.

The pattern repeated across the mountains. Journalists came looking for primitive violence. What they found, if they looked carefully, was a region losing a war it didn't fully know it was fighting.